Kerry Allen

Originally appeared May 24, 2007

Say what you will about the heaving mantitty clinch covers. I’ll start. They’re embarrassing, laughable, and do nothing to increase the respectability of the romance genre.

But.

I was reading Johanna Lindsey books with their dawn-of-Fabio covers when my contemporaries were still reading Laura Ingalls Wilder. When I left home, I needed my own copies (because my mother is selfish and wouldn’t share with her baby). At that point, the trend in cover art was toward abstract and flowery, so that’s what’s on my shelf now.

(The exception being Tender Rebel, for which I guilted mum into taking the pristine new copy with its flower power and squirreled away the clinch copy with its cracked binding and yellowed pages for myself. Can you blame me? It’s pre-Fabio. The hero’s shirtless shoulder is nicely muscled but not overly so and unobscured by the overlong greasy locks that would take over a couple of years later. The sight of it still makes my heart go pitty-pat.)

I thought the flower movement was a good thing, as I was always repulsed by Fabio and could happily live without seeing him every time I reached for a romance novel.

A funny thing happened that kinda sorta changed my mind about the heaving mantitty clinch covers, though. As I was entering my abstract flowery J. Li’s into LibraryThing, I thought, “Romance titles are nonsensical. Gentle Rogue indeed. Gag. I have no idea what’s actually in this book.” Then I clicked the link to change the cover art.

Pow! “Oh, that’s James and Georgie’s story.” She’s posing as a cabin boy. He’s not fooled. She doesn’t know he knows and believes he believes he’s putting the moves on a boy. Hilarity ensues.

Instant. Product. Recognition.

Guess what I put in my TBR to be enjoyed again.

We remember beefcake-poofy dress covers. They might make us cringe, but we remember them. They’re colorful. They try to titillate by showing empirically attractive people consumed with lust in various stages of getting it on. They engage the interest in a way flowers or a lone shirtless man or a grayscale headshot or a cutesie cartoon or some anonymous piece of scenery never can.

Chances are, if you remember a cover with Fabio wearing neon green eyeshadow, you can remember something inside the book, too. Perhaps only that there was no mention of the hero having transvestite tendencies, but that’s something.

I don’t want to be seen in public with a heaving mantitty clinch cover any more than you do, but I now have to admit they serve their purpose. There’s no mistaking that style of art as belonging to any other genre. When you grab a hunk of heaving mantitty, you know exactly what you’re getting.

The current reprint of Tender Rebel, by the way, has a castle on the front. There is no frickin’ castle anywhere in that book. It is not a visual that evokes a feeling of romance for me and is never going to trigger a fond memory of the story within those pages.

So I’ll be hanging onto my battered 20-year-old copy, thanks very much.

Soul Song by Marjorie M. Liu
Mass Market Paperback, 336 pages
ISBN: 0843957662
Available Now
Retail Price $6.99

Marjorie Liu is known for taking readers on journeys to exotic locales such as Asia, Russia, Las Vegas, and now… Canada.

Hey, when Marjorie Liu takes you to Canada, it’s exotic. She brings a setting to life the way few authors can. When she makes the heroine walk through a bad neighborhood, you urge her to quicken her pace. When she imprisons a character in a filthy cell, you gag in sympathy. She always manages to find that one detail—often an uncomfortable one—that makes the setting real.

Ms. Liu can never be accused of flinching from unpleasantness. Not only are her characters immersed in ugliness from the moment of introduction, but even the good guys do ugly things.

M’cal is a Krackeni (a much more impressive-sounding handle than merman) whose song can manipulate life and bring death. Enslaved by a witch, compelled to collect souls for her dining pleasure, he detests what he has become, but even death is no escape for him. He has lost all hope, until the witch for the first time commands him to bring her a specific soul.

Kitala Bell is a gifted musician whose song resonates with power, but she also has another gift—gruesome visions of death. When she chooses to warn the victim of her most recent vision, her interference brings Kit into the line of fire, as well. She instinctively trusts the man who saves her life, even after he tells her he was sent to kill her.

The last thing M’cal wants to do is hurt Kit, but his wants are meaningless as long as the witch is pulling his strings. When he is compelled to carry out the task he was given, Kit’s instinctive defense not only saves her soul but shatters the witch’s hold over M’cal—at least temporarily.

United by a song only they can hear, Kit and M’cal must learn to combine their powers to save each other and defeat an enemy that threatens much more than their own future.

(Gah. This is almost like writing a query letter. Agonizing, but good practice, I suppose.)

Another thing I like about Ms. Liu’s storytelling, in addition to her you-are-here settings and her carefully crafted mythology, is the villain hierarchy:

• Street thugs and corrupt cops, greedy and violent but easily vanquished.
• The wicked witch and her mutant henchman, despicably cruel, persistent as a bad dream, but ultimately displaying a drop of humanity that makes their behavior comprehensible, if no more forgivable.
• Finally, those that are purely evil and simply terrifying, who may be banished for now but promise to return stronger than ever.

It’s that layering of danger that sets up future stories in which everything is going to go to hell—literally.

Ms. Liu became an autobuy for me when I read Tiger Eye, and Soul Song ensures that I will continue to impatiently eagerly await her next release.

I don’t judge a book by its cover. Maybe it’s because I buy 99.99 percent of my books online, and it’s hard to judge the teeny-tiny image available. Maybe it’s because I know cover creation has little to nothing to do with the content of the book, which is what I really care about. Maybe I’m just not that visually oriented.

There are people, however, who won’t touch a book if they find the cover offputting for whatever reason. There are some covers that even I, brazen wench that I am, would dread taking out in public. There are some covers, though, that stand out as exceptional. Here are a few of my favorites:

Generally speaking, I don’t want to see a character’s face on the cover because it never coincides with my imagination, and my idea of an attractive male face is oddly out of sync with the world of male modeling.

A notable exception is the cover of Lynn Viehl’s Dark Need. This is not at all how I envisioned Lucan (the male lead in the book), but I like looking at this guy’s face so much, it replaced that of one of my own characters in my mind.

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I think J.R. Ward’s covers are pretty tasteful. Technically, that’s a clinch, but the monochromatic scheme tones it down and classes it up.

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The covers of Shana Abe’s Drakon books depict no people at all.

(If I could find this dragon in the form of a mirror frame, it would be on my wall right now.)

However, my mother returned this book to me unread because she could not identify it on sight as a romance novel. I ’splained it to her and gave it back. She read it and really enjoyed it, but she would have passed on it, based on the cover, as being something other than what she was interested in reading…

I even have a favorite among the 1980s bodice-ripper covers, so much so that I bought my mother a brand-new copy (with the abstract flowery cover that was en vogue at that time) so I could take this one with me when I left home.

I have a shoulder fetish, what can I say? (Man shoulder, that is. I want to tell her to fix her sleeve.)

(This cover also snuck in just before the Dawn of Fabio. The next book in the series was not so fortunate.)

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I don’t read historicals anymore, but I think the covers of Liz Carlyle’s latest series are beautiful.

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The first thing I jotted down when planning this post was “The hero isn’t running around half naked in the book, so why does he always have to be half naked on the cover?” So I cracked up when I dropped by Meljean Brook’s site, where she had posted the cover of Kresley Cole’s next paranormal (my first glimpse of a book I have been waiting and waiting for) with the caption “Clothes are way hawt on a hero.”

So true. Enough with the heaving bosoms of both genders. I’ll spearhead a charity clothing drive for cover models if that’s what it takes to supply shirts for them all.

(Note that the woman on Cole’s cover is wearing a fabulous gravity-defying designer gown. You can have it. Ms. Brook and I will be duking it out for the guy’s coat. She’s a tiny thing—I bet I can take her.)

What are your favorite romance covers and why, and for those ruled by that first visual impression, what cover qualities make for an auto-reject?